Diligent Candy

In a cinematic world that often equates impact with intensity, Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop dares to whisper. Directed by Kyōhei Ishiguro, this 2021 anime film is a gentle study in restraint—a teenage summer romance told through soft hues, quiet poetry, and emotional understatement. Clocking in at just under 90 minutes, it’s light as air, but to call it insubstantial would miss the point entirely. The film’s real achievement lies in how delicately it holds everything it wants to say.

The story follows Cherry, a boy who speaks best through haiku, and Smile, a girl who hides her braces—and her insecurities—behind a mask and an online persona. They meet by accident in a suburban shopping mall and are drawn together through a shared summer job and a mutual desire to communicate differently than the world expects of them. At the center of the plot is a missing vinyl record belonging to a retired haiku master in their care home—a simple quest, seemingly small, but layered with memory, loss, and the weight of unspoken emotion.

There are no villains, no major revelations, no melodramatic crescendos. Instead, the drama unfolds in the quiet interplay between visibility and invisibility: Cherry’s reluctance to speak versus Smile’s curated presence. The emotional stakes are interior. What’s at risk is not the world, but the self—whether it can risk being seen.

Color as Emotional Cartography

If words in this film are scarce, color does the heavy lifting. Ishiguro and his team deploy a hyper-saturated palette that recalls pop-art sensibilities—neon signs, acid-bright skies, candy-colored festival scenes—but with precision. Each shade is deliberate. Cherry’s world is often rendered in greys and blues: sterile, neutral, withdrawn. Smile, by contrast, arrives in bursts of yellow and pink, wrapped in light and charm.

But this isn’t a simplistic color coding of character traits. As the characters grow closer, their visual environments begin to overlap. Cool tones warm. Bright spaces quiet down. Color becomes a kind of grammar—unspoken, fluid, and emotionally fluent. The film’s use of palette mirrors its broader philosophy: that true connection happens not in spectacle, but in subtlety.

The Architecture of a Haiku

Cherry writes haiku. Short, minimalist poems that follow a 5-7-5 syllabic structure. His compositions appear on-screen as floating text—ephemeral, almost weightless. But like the film itself, these small verses carry depth. They compress feeling, attention, and metaphor into a form that resists overstatement.

The film borrows the haiku’s structure in more than just theme. Its scenes are compact and economical, focused on gesture over action. Long pauses, unspoken thoughts, the breeze through a curtain—these moments serve as the “seasonal words” of the film’s emotional landscape. The pacing is slow, but never idle. Like haiku, the film trusts implication over explanation.

This influence extends to the film’s broader architecture. Its three-act structure feels less like a rising arc and more like a wave: rising, cresting, then dissolving. The climax—when the sought-after record is finally played, revealing the dying haiku master’s final poem—is moving not because of high drama, but because it completes a quiet circle. Words lost are finally heard.

Listening as a Form of Love

What makes Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop quietly radical is its attention to how we listen. In a media landscape dominated by characters who monologue their emotions into catharsis, Cherry and Smile circle each other with gentler forms of communication. Their bond grows not through declarations, but shared silences, sideways glances, unfinished thoughts.

Even the supporting characters—particularly the elderly poet whose memory is fading—are treated with patient attention. The lost record isn’t just a narrative device; it’s a symbol of how voices can vanish if no one’s listening. The film understands that memory is fragile, and so is intimacy. Its answer isn’t spectacle, but presence.

Soda, Summer, and the Aftertaste of Feeling

The film’s title is not a metaphor in disguise—it’s a thesis. Words, like soda, can be fizzy, fleeting, a little sweet, and surprisingly sharp. They bubble up when least expected. And like a drink left too long in the sun, they can lose their fizz if no one’s paying attention.

It is about that fleeting moment when two people understand each other—despite fear, despite noise, despite everything. It’s about the risk of being heard, the thrill of being seen, and the poetry that emerges when silence is finally given form.

It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. But that’s precisely its strength. In a world crowded with noise, this film offers a quiet glass of something strange and beautiful. Not to gulp, but to sip—slowly, attentively, until the very last word fizzes away.

I’m deeply interested in how this genre—gentle, slice-of-life anime like Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop—plays with stillness and languidness not as a lack of action, but as a rich emotional terrain. Films like Only Yesterday or The Garden of Words unfold in long pauses and glances that say more than dialogue ever could. Stillness here isn’t absence; it’s presence magnified. The languid pacing allows moments to stretch, breathe, and gather meaning—like watching ink bloom in water. It resists narrative urgency in favor of something quieter, more interior: the slow work of noticing, of listening, of feeling. In this kind of cinema, time doesn’t move forward—it deepens.